Dispatches from the 10th Crusade

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Passivity and paralysis.

Yet another massacre of innocents in a public place — it’s become all too common in this country. The shock of it, that staggering horror we all felt back in the Nineties, has proven evanescent. There is now a routine to it: the television networks have their “Tragedy in Omaha” graphics ready within a half hour. A few witnesses are interviewed, the horror retold briefly; the police repeat some platitudes, perhaps a distant accomplice or collaborator is questioned and released; a few psychologists or criminal profilers utter their usual tedium — and then it’s back to coverage of the Iowa caucuses.

What are the chances that there will be a real effort of self-reflection following this latest mass murder/suicide in a public place? As David Kopel wrote (subscription only) on the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre (in a Weekly Standard article that made a vivid impression on me at the time): “the real lesson of Columbine is that very few people care enough about the horrible events of April 20, 1999, to try to prevent their recurrence.”

He continued, “That the year after Columbine has been spent on trivial and irrelevant debates — instead of on serious proposals to save lives — is a sign of the degeneracy of our political culture.”

Kopel’s essay amounts to a searing arraignment of the social state of the country: passive, baffled, mute in the face of the swagger of nihilism: in short, morally paralyzed. Others have built upon these arguments. After the VA Tech massacre last April, a few commentators were so bold as to wonder aloud why so few of the young men present at that holocaust dared to confront the killer. Most choose to flee. Self-interest ruled. Only an aging Israeli professor resisted.

In a private conversation with some friends, someone made a trenchant point. Our paralysis is, as it were, preemptive. We are so baffled by evil that we just don’t think about it; thus, we are invariably stunned into inaction when it appears. But actions in a crisis require mental preparation; a fortiori if the actions must be coordinated to be effective. A single shooter, even armed with an assault rifle, can be quickly overpowered if men band together against him. This is a fact. It is a fact affirmed dramatically by the courageous collective action of the Flight 93 passengers in September 11.

Even going just this far in the discussion is to leave behind the standard narrative of “tragedy” (a word rendered meaningless in our age), victimhood, and bewilderment at the brazenness of evil. Who would dare to argue that, since we are manifestly a society that rears up among us young men whose depravity issues in murder-suicide in schools and malls, we must perforce become a society that trains other men to resist? In short, who among us will argue that wickedness must be resisted, and that our young men must be trained up in a tradition which honors those who will resist? Not so long ago, as James Bowman has documented, this tradition remained in force. The classical Western in film was its exemplar. In recent years the tradition has nearly vanished. What are we to make of this astonishing fact?

What, to speak more uncomfortably, are we to make of the fact of our passivity in the face of evil? What will be the verdict of history, once some objective distance is achieved, on a society that has cultivated an actual tradition of this depravity, and emasculated the tradition of resistance to it?

My first instinct here is to consider this part of the wages of removing the fear of God from the hearts of men. The fear of God issues in a sense of duty. The only Righteous Judge is a more fearsome prospect for the God-fearing man than all the schemes of men. The God-fearing man has a hard time thinking of anything more terrifying than standing before His Throne of Judgment, hard on the heels of massacring 10 or 12 innocents and then taking my own life; or of standing before that same Throne, having fled the field of danger when decisive action may have saved the weak.

We have ourselves a violent society; but there is little courage. Our streets teem with braggarts; whose quintessential test of strength has become, How many unarmed innocents can I slaughter?

This latest shooter said he wanted to “go out in style,” and indeed he did: the style of cowards and nihilists, which is becoming the American popular tradition.

Comments (34)

At least with respect to the school shootings, which often possess backgrounds of incessant bullying and social marginalization - among other factors, though it is often the tormenting and the indifference of educators thereto that occasions the actual moral rupture - I believe that there is a symbiosis between the establishment response to the deformed social relations which occasion the murderous rampages and the passivity of the responses to those rampages. In the case of the former, whatever administrators and psychotherapists might state for attribution, the de facto policies hold that bullying and tormenting are, in effect, forces of nature with which children simply must deal, parts of growing up (Into what?, I ask). If such deformed social relations are in that sense natural, part of the order of things, then, logically, so also are the outcomes; and if we do not know how to reckon with the inputs, we will not understand how to respond to the outputs. If it is natural to torment, it is natural for the tormented to react.

This, of course, is to say nothing of indifferent parents, of the negligent sort who pay no mind to their children's indulgence in depraved entertainments, be they video games, films, or music; of the criminally negligent mental health system, hamstrung by generations of leftist "the insane are entitled to autonomy, too" nonsense, which precludes effective interventions upon those, young and old, of diminished capacities; or our culture's incapacity - to speak of the same - to discriminate between the possibility of malevolent violence and the threat of legitimate, righteous violence in defense of the innocent.

However, when contemplated under each of these aspects, what our culture discloses is that things abnormal by nature are treated as normal - sometimes laudable - and when we are thus passive in the face of evil, permitting it to flourish, we cannot but be passive when evil yields its harvest. We do not desire a stringent examination of our habits and mores, and in consequence, we do not even understand ourselves - and, not understanding ourselves, we do not understand what we - or some among us - do. Resistance to evil must occur at many points, and in many moments, prior to the crisis - perhaps then the crisis will not come at all.

To put this as baldly as possible, the Anointed, among which count the educators who raise most American children, as virulent passivists. They truly believe that if Mo beats up on the Little Guy, and the Little Guy fights back and knocks Mo on his rear end, they are both equally bad and should both be suspended for Fighting, which is Evil. Moral equivalence is _dogma_ for those in charge, and boys have been trained from youngest childhood to know that they will get in trouble with the teacher, the principle, everybody except (maybe) their Dad, if they stand up to bullies. In law and w.r.t. adults, this same attitude takes almost innumerable forms. It is a pathology in Europe. Did anyone else read about how things went down at the Glasgow airport? The _police_ were spraying some sort of gas fumes out of little bottles to try to take down the bad guys. The _cabbie_ hit the bad guy running toward him in the nose. The police couldn't bring themselves to do that! What did the cabbie get for that? The police took off his clothes, made him hang around for a long time, and eventually kept his new running shoes. The populace hailed him as a hero. Officialdom obviously had its nose out of joint. The same applies in home breakins. I've heard of one policeman who said (in private) that if you shoot a home invader and he happens to get outside before collapsing, you'd better drag his body into the house or else you might get in trouble for having shot him. I was told yesterday (haven't looked it up on-line) about a Texan who went to stop some guys who were breaking into his neighbors' home. They came at him with a weapon; he shot them and killed at least some of them. Now the grievance-mongers are out in force. I don't know what's going to happen to the guy. But when you think of doing what _I_ would call the normal thing and physically resisting the evil-doer, defending the innocent, you have to take seriously into account the possibility that the Powers that Be will punish you for it.

So we're a crazy society in this regard, which obviously discourages men from being anything _but_ passive in these situations. The official dogma is that only a very restricted group of people have the _moral_ right to resist the evil-doer, even in an emergency situation. So if you aren't a policeman or a security guard, you're considered to be morally obligated to be passive. I really think most liberals believe this.

Not "people." Men. If a gunman enters a store, intent to slaughter anyone in sight, including women and children, I do firmly belief that men have an obligation to resist as best they can. I pity the man who does not believe this. Now it is certainly true that many men will fail. There is no shame in that; rather, there is real honor: and it is highly likely that even failure will succeed in the sense that it will allow others to escape.

The blame for massacres rests with these craven criminals alone. No one is disputing that. But the explanation for how we have come to this pass requires deeper thought.

I don't think you can entirely separate the gun-control issue from the issue of passivity or from the issue of liberal dogma. The liberal dogma is that only the agents of the government should defend anybody with force. Everybody else should just sit tight, keep their heads low, go into lockdown, or run away. The liberal dogma that only the police should have guns is just one expression of this overarching "only the government can defend you" ideology.

The typical liberal response—and I mean "liberal" in the sense of those assumptions that nearly all of us in America take for granted—is that something must be done to stop the young man from picking up the rifle in the first place. This would certainly be good, but how? This line of thought (whether the proposed solution is gun control or psychotherapy) seems to me mostly unfruitful—it seems impossible to short-circuit an evil will. But it also seems in other ways misguided, as you point out, Paul. Included in an effort to avoid any struggle is an effort to shelter people from any need for courage. We must ask ourselves: Is our phobia of violence—even righteous violence—so strong that we would desire a world without physical courage? Have we deposed the virtue of courage and installed the virtue of comfort? (To be clear, I’m not accusing the surviving victims of such an act of thinking only of comfort; I’m holding that accusation against those whose only response is "This must not happen in the first place.")

You make a good point here, Paul, that a lack of courage is not just a factor in our response: It is also very likely at the root of the killer's character.

On the Columbine shooting, it was something unprecedented and like other firsts, the element of surprise usually does paralyze.

The Flight 93 passengers, while certainly brave, only decided to take action once they heard of the fate of the other airplanes. Again, it was an attack so outside the domain of expectations, every airline procedure prior to 9/11 was designed to start a negotiation with the hijackers.

For the VA Tech shooting, I have mixed feelings. There was construction going on nearby that resulted in a delayed response to the noise, but the screaming that eventually started alerted everyone to what was happening. At that point, a small group could have organized a counterattack with a moderate chance of success. Tactically speaking, Cho held the advantage for most of the nine minute spree. Three of the five faculty killed were at the front of their class, unaware or just barely aware of what was happening, one was barricading the door, and another was investigating after leading his class to safety on the third floor.

Sometimes the "typical liberal response" makes you wonder about the sheer lack of imagination in liberals. I mean, there are options.

The other day I was in a hardware store. There was some commotion out front that startled people. Not even sure what happened. But it got me thinking, if something like THAT (Omaha or Columbine or Jonesboro, Ark. -- that last a year before Columbine, Step2) is going to happen, let it be in a hardware store! 5 seconds of considered thought will open up a vista of resistance opportunities. As long as the gunman isn't right next to you, there are plenty of ways to harass and distract him. Many would not even require you to expose yourself.

This is way I mentioned that effort of "mental preparation" that my friend brought up. It is fine prudence.

But yes, we must also have fortitude; fearing the Lord will grant that.

As a testament to the pervasiveness of the dogma of passivity, I submit my own experience at a (private) elementary school: bullied incessantly by a select group of students, I eventually fought back, drawing the attention of the teachers and earning the designation of 'antisocial and aggressive', for which reason I was referred to a therapist. Mercifully, though my parents decided to humour an administration that was in the process of forfeiting trust, the therapist himself, upon hearing my repeated seven-year-old protests of, "What else was I supposed to do?", apprised the school of the fact that I exhibited no symptoms of any personality disorders.

In other words, self-defense might be indicative of mental disturbance - such is the presupposition, and lesson, of the passivity dogma, itself the consequence of the de-moralization of violence, its reduction to a positive category of behaviour, undifferentiated and admitting of no distinctions. That just is applied liberalism. It is also reflective of the dominant social science dogmas of the period, according to which the conduct of the criminal is not so much the consequence of his depravity, but of his deprivation, of society's failure towards him; the demand of the public, therefore, for more effective law enforcement and the punishment of malefactors could only be perverse, and doubly so: "society" subjected the future criminal to privation and prejudice, only to smite him with malicious, vengeful wrath when he responded to the injustices inflicted upon him in the only manner open to him.

Maximos, amen. And a sensible therapist? You were lucky. That one's a flying pig moment.

One friend used to tell me I should send my kids to public school (actually, this conversation took place before I had kids) without worrying too much about their being beaten up, because it would be good for them to learn self-defense. I was given the whole spiel about how Dad should teach Junior how to box and such and then send him back to school to tough it out. (Doesn't Ingrid Bergman do that in "The Bells of St. Mary"?) I wasn't much impressed with the reasonableness of this advice, chiefly because we wouldn't ask a guy to go to a job where he was going to get attacked every day and just tell him, "Learn to box." But it's even more ridiculous advice now, because defending himself will just get Junior in trouble.

[First, the faux-outrage: check] The typical liberal response? [Next, a distracting non sequitur: check] I thought Nebraska was a Red State? I had no idea that Omaha [cleverly indicate a specificity never implied in the post: check] was such a secular liberal stronghold that there would tragically be no God-fearing conservatives [subtle implication of hauteur and hypocrisy: check] shopping in a huge mall in the Christmas season, ready to plunge headlong into a hail of bullets [throw in a nice strawman: check], while the huddled liberal pansies wet their knickers in fear and trembling [jocular crudity: check].
Where's Chuck Heston [crack about NRA: check] when you need him, eh?

I've heard of one policeman who said (in private) that if you shoot a home invader and he happens to get outside before collapsing, you'd better drag his body into the house or else you might get in trouble for having shot him.

I've heard that, too, and it's nonsense. You'll get in more trouble if you move his corpse. You can even turn a good shoot into a bad one. If you've tampered with evidence, the state won't believe your protestations of innocence. Don't do it!!!

As for the specific legality of shooting home invaders, it depends on your state's laws. In Texas, Florida, and other states, including, surprisingly enough, California, you have a clear right to use deadly force against intruders under the various "Castle Doctrine" statutes. In other states without such laws, it depends. Here in Virginia, you would be within your rights in most cases. In states like Massachussetts with a duty to retreat in the law, perhaps not.

Regarding active shooters and their like, I commend Jeffrey Snyder's "A Nation of Cowards." It is a bit too libertarian and contractarian in some of its reasoning, but pungent and persuasive in its skewering of the mentality of passivity being discussed here. I have a jaundiced enough opinion of my fellow man to be glad that everyone isn't armed, but I'm glad that I am able to be armed when out and about, and detest laws and arbitrary restrictions, such as the gun-free zones established in the very shopping mall where this latest atrocity took place, that make it impossible or burdensome. A pistol is a poor substitute for a rifle, but it's better than being left with nothing at all.

There are also untrained civilians and teenagers who are temporarily paralyzed by blood and chaos, but thankfully conservatives easily dispel it with their gun slinging martial expertise.

Jonesboro, Ark. -- that last a year before Columbine...

That was the same type of attack? The shooters stayed hidden in the forest, they had an escape plan (a poor one btw), and for all the death and injury they caused, they had a primary target of a teacher they disliked. So obviously, Columbine was a copycat.

Step2: for the record in my experience there is no evidence that liberals are less courageous than conservatives. The implication that I have argued otherwise is the figment of someone's imagination. Liberal theory undermines courage, it is true, but many liberals remain brave nevertheless.

Rodak: I should think that would have been clear enough. It is possible to talk about the wider culture which has produced this tradition of slaughter-suicide without overthrowing the the ineradicable legal and moral blame that attaches to the criminal. Liberals do the same thing, of course: lately it has been in connection with the recent noose incidents.

You are casting blame on the scale of the damage to the lack manliness of Nebraska civilian men.

I am not, Royale. So most of the articles in your bill of indictment are inapplicable. You are talking to ghosts.

The Dave Kopel essay I referred to in the OP reserved its most direct censure for the passivity of the police SWAT teams at Columbine, who waited for hours before entering the school. Many individual policemen wanted to go in right away, but were constrained by their commanders.

There is nothing about my argument that can reasonably be construed as specific to Nebraskans, Coloradans, or Virginians. More ghosts.

Nor, indeed, did I ever argued that liberals are somehow by nature more likely to be cowards. This trope of "tough conservatives and weak liberals," which several commenters have repeated, is spun out of their own assumptions and prejudices and is nowhere found in my essay. In my experience, political views do not correlate with physical courage, mostly because normal people wear their political views pretty lightly while fortitude is a deep and enduring virtue.

And (for about the tenth time) I have not even suggested that men ought to "commit suicide" with some blind rush at the gunmen. The narrowness of your imagination is remarkable.

I have not even suggested that men ought to "commit suicide" with some blind rush at the gunmen. The narrowness of your imagination is remarkable

Oh? I'd say that this, at the very least, "suggests" just that:

A single shooter, even armed with an assault rifle, can be quickly overpowered if men band together against him. This is a fact. It is a fact affirmed dramatically by the courageous collective action of the Flight 93 passengers in September 11.

The men on Flight 93 were, of course, knowingly committing suicide by overpowering the hijackers and crashing the plane. So, if that's your implied prescription for "real men", then suicide it is, laudable though it may be.
The obverse of the passive cops at Columbine coin, of course, are the Rudy Giuliani plain clothes hit squads that cleaned up the boroughs of NYC, and, unfortunately, took out some Amadou Diallos in the process. The obverse of civilian passivity coin, taken just a short way from trying to disarm a gunman, is vigilante-ism.
So, yes, trained professionals--cops--should be handling these situations. If we need more of them in places like malls, then we should ante up and hire them.

But Royale: if you persist in repeating accusations that have been answered and refuted, I'm afraid we're going to have to ban you from the site.

Rodak: your definition of "suicide" is so muddled as to call your judgment into question.

The men on Flight 93 were, of course, knowingly committing suicide by overpowering the hijackers and crashing the plane.

Perhaps you will share with us this mind-reading trick you have perfected.

In truth we cannot know with much precision the motives and knowledge of those brave men; but the general consensus is that the hijackers crashed the plane, to avoid being overpowered. Our resident pilot, Zippy, can perhaps tell us what chances the passengers might have had to land safely without a trained pilot, if the hijackers had been overpowered.

Again the narrowness of the liberal mind is on display: it cannot distinguish a long-odds attempt to resist evildoers from attempted suicide. What is particularly contemptible here, is that this narrowness issues in the accusation that the Flight 93 passengers committed suicide, a mortal sin. They did no such thing; and I defy you to repeat that accusation in plain words against their honored memory.

The obverse of the passive cops at Columbine coin, of course, are the Rudy Giuliani plain clothes hit squads that cleaned up the boroughs of NYC, and, unfortunately, took out some Amadou Diallos in the process.

Bad cops and police brutality will always be with us, and should be dealt with vigorously: but it is still true that the NYPD is the best police force in the country, maybe in the whole world.

So, yes, trained professionals--cops--should be handling these situations. If we need more of them in places like malls, then we should ante up and hire them.

No dispute here. Alas, we cannot have trained professional everywhere. I'll take my chances with good, decent, quick-thinking citizens.

Actually, in the context of Rodak's other comments, especially about vigilantism, I take this to be an expression of the dogma that citizens _should not_ defend themselves in these situations and that _only_ "professionals" should take action, with which I know the rest of us do disagree.

A single shooter, even armed with an assault rifle, can be quickly overpowered if men band together against him. This is a fact. It is a fact affirmed dramatically by the courageous collective action of the Flight 93 passengers in September 11.

Paul,
I think you're mistaken in this claim. The hijackers were armed with contact weapons, and in a confined area. Even at Virginia Tech, given the short distances and the relatively low wounding power of handguns, minimally-coordinated physical assault could well have disabled Cho, but even a 7.62 X 39 mm rifle is both several times more lethal than the 9mm and .22 LR pistols used at Virginia Tech, and several times easier to shoot with a given level of speed and accuracy. While even an eventually lethal wound from a pistol cartridge is not likely immediately to incapacitate someone who doesn't want to be incapacitated, expanding bullets fired from a rifle tend to be immediately effective.

The point of this over-long digression into weapons is simply that for an unarmed man to attack someone armed with a self-loading rifle across the typically open layouts of shopping malls is almost certain suicide availing nothing. At very close quarters, one has a chance, but with any time or distance on his side, the gunman will kill his attackers unless they can arrange a human wave that can cover the distance faster than he can kill them.
Now, if one is going to die anyway, there's no reason not to fight, but if one can just run away rather than commit suicide, I'm not going to blame him. Even if one has a handgun and is ready to use it, a rifle-armed active shooter is very dangerous, as Mark Wilson learned at the Tyler, Texas courthouse.

All of the preceding is not to say that you don't have a point, a point exemplified in this comment of Rodak:

The obverse of civilian passivity coin, taken just a short way from trying to disarm a gunman, is vigilante-ism.
So, yes, trained professionals--cops--should be handling these situations. If we need more of them in places like malls, then we should ante up and hire them.

Yes, we need and have professionals in the use of violence, but the idea that we should either collectively or individually depend solely on them is both foolish and anti-republican. We have doctors and mechanics, too, but that doesn't mean we can or ought to ignore the welfare of our bodies or our cars, or neglect to learn the Heimlich maneuver or how to change a flat tire. Since violence is an occasional fact of life, and because malevolent narcissists and the more common type of criminal both tend to avoid acting out in the presence of law enforcement, it's wise for the rest of us to be willing and able to do something about it. That is something we seem to have lost.

Actually, in the context of Rodak's other comments, especially about vigilantism, I take this to be an expression of the dogma that citizens _should not_ defend themselves in these situations and that _only_ "professionals" should take action, with which I know the rest of us do disagree.

I read it the same way. Vigilantism properly defined is something to be despised, but equating it to lawful and commendable self-defense is an egregious error.

Point taken, Cyrus. I've only fired a high-power rifle a few times, and never an assault rifle.

Still, I'm not talking about simply rushing the gunman. My understanding is that the Omaha shooting occurred in a department store, which means that the area was probably not particularly wide open, or least nor devoid of cover; and that a coordinated effort to distract and harass was possible.

Since these despicable cowards seem invariably committed to suicide, a pretty clear tactical posture would be to accelerate their time schedule, so to speak. At Columbine, for instance, it is fairly clear that the gunmen, believing (falsely, it turns out) that the police were in the building, panicked and killed themselves before they could do more damage.

This gets back, again, to the point about mental preparation. It is incumbent upon us in this age, I'm afraid, to at least give some thought to how would be best to respond to a lunatic shooter in our midst. In many (perhaps most) cases, running like hell is the best option. But not always. Not always.

Isn't part of the problem in any of these situations that a man is surrounded by strangers and cannot count on being able to get a group together to help him coordinate a response? And there really isn't much time in which to try to organize anything.

I think untrained civilians mounting any sort of unarmed, but coordinated resistance against the likes of Cho or the Nebraska shooter is beyond plausible. Such actions would more than likely add to the body count. The best way to "help" would probably be to assist in the evacuation of everyone else.

I agree with you in the mall shooting in Omaha, but in the tight quarters of a crowded classroom, I'm convinced Cho could have been overpowered, and given the alternatives for the occupants of those rooms, viz. jumping out a window or dying where they stood, should have been. It wouldn't have made things any worse for someone to try. As it was, Cho had the run of the place until the police showed up and forced entry, at which point he shot himself. I can't help but think that the continued admonitions from authorities, be they school teachers and administrators or police officials, that passivity is the correct response in the face of violence, makes things worse. Hunkering down in the face of a killer with an AK-47 is not a recipe for long life. It seems the only answer though, for the mouthpieces of our government of schoolmarms.

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